Author: John Schell on behalf of Yo Naturals. Go to www.yonaturals.com to find out how you can start your own healthy vending business!
You know that, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” but
did you know how this applies to your weight? Kick starting your
metabolism with food that will keep your GI tract working efficiently
can help stop mid afternoon snack cravings.
A major reason that breakfast is such an effective meal for weight loss
is that it typically consists of foods that are high in fiber. A high
dosage of fiber is crucial to smoothly working digestion. You might
associate fiber with regulated bowel movements, but fiber also has the
effect of slowing down the digestive tract. By keeping food from moving
quickly through the ileocecal valve, fiber manages to keep your stomach
full for longer.
Some other added benefits to a few more whole grains in your diet
include a steady blood sugar level through the day, and reduced caloric
intake for up to eighteen hours. A healthy place to start is to add 1 to
2 grams of dietary fiber before eating and before going to sleep.
Ultimately, an ideal is to get around 30 grams of dietary fiber each
day, with as much as possible in the morning. By eating foods like
fiber-rich cereal, whole grains, oatmeal, and fruit, you’ll feel fuller
longer and won’t get hit with a growling stomach an hour after lunchtime.
People often try skipping breakfast in order to lose weight, but this is
simply counterproductive. Missing meals doesn’t fool your body into
thinking that it is fully fueled, but rather robs the brain of
all-important glucose and slows down the metabolism in order to conserve
energy. Early morning crankiness and candy bar cravings kick in, and by
lunchtime your body thinks that it needs a porterhouse to get satiated.
Tests have shown that children who eat a healthy morning breakfast score
better and have fewer behavioral problems than those who didn’t. You can
bet that the same holds true for job performance. And a sugary breakfast
doesn’t count. For all the reasons that sugar-filled foods (which tend
to be high in calories from fat) aren’t good for you, a bowl of fruit
loops has the added deficit of behaving as if you didn’t eat a breakfast
at all. Plus, now your metabolism has started working, and by nine
o’clock you’ll be hungrier than you were when you woke up.
There are a hundred and one reasons to bail out on breakfast, but
there’s one all-important reason to eat well: you. Getting your body’s
requisite allotment of fiber and healthy calories will insure that you
coast through the day, instead of crashing every time a Snickers isn’t
within arm’s reach.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Eat a Healthy Breakfast from Yo Naturals!
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Healthy Vending: Obesity at Epidemic Levels
Author: Laura Rayburn
Next time that you are out at a mall, an airport, or anywhere else that you can find a large number of people milling around, check out the look of your fellow man. It's very likely that you will see a significant percentage of obese or overweight people in those crowds. Obesity is reaching epidemic levels in this country and in others, and it is bringing more problems with it as the numbers rise. We at Yo Naturals healthy vending are doing our best to fight this pervasive atrocity.
As people have trended toward eating foods that are loaded with calories while shunning physical activity, obesity has reached epidemic levels around the globe. Researchers estimate the number of overweight adults in this world to be over 1 billion with about 300 million of those people meeting the standards of being considered clinically obese. In turn, obesity is a major contributing factor in a number of chronic diseases and ailments.
Unfortunately, this problem is not confined to adults, as obesity in children is also on the rise. Researchers estimate that worldwide there are around 22 million children under the age of five that are overweight. In America specifically, the Surgeon General says that the number of overweight children has doubled since 1980, and the number of overweight adolescents has tripled.
Genes do also play a role in the development and prevalence of obesity, although they cannot be solely to blame for the rapid rise in obesity around the globe. Even as technology and economic growth has changed the face of our world and the way that we interact with one another, it has also played a role in making high calorie foods more available to the population at large and in decreasing the need for physical labor and activity in order to make a living. Obesity is not restricted to fully industrialized nations though, as a number of studies have shown through statistics and information on the rapid rise of obesity in developing nations. Obesity is quickly becoming a problem on all seven continents and from sea to shining sea.
The bad news does not end there either. The costs of the increasing prevalence of obesity put strains on health care systems that have to deal with the many diseases and conditions that are related to and have resulted from obesity, including high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol levels, and increased insulin resistance. Many common cardiovascular diseases can be traced back to the prevalence of obesity, as can the rising number of cases of Type 2 diabetes. (Out of the people with Type 2 diabetes, an overwhelming 90 percent of them are obese or overweight.)
It is quickly becoming evident that effective weight management techniques will have to be taken up by the world at large if we expect to get our problem with obesity and all of its related problems under our control again. So, next time you think about eating from a machine, make sure its a healthy vending machine.